How long will universe last

ronbyrne2005

? I've heard a trillion years to a thousand trillion. How can it be estimated?

SorGan

forever.......sure why not:)

Clytus

A very good question OP.

Iv been trying to get to grips with string theory recently....and now Im even more confused than i was before.....

An analogy put to me before was imagine trying to explain calculus to a chimp....you teach him for years and years....but will he ever be able to do complex calculations?? the answer is NO...he doesnt have the mental capacity to.....us humans are the chimps when it comes to understanding the secrets of the "universe"

Son Goku

ronbyrne2005 wrote: »

? I've heard a trillion years to a thousand trillion. How can it be estimated?

If the universe doesn't kill itself through collapse, e.t.c. then there are processes naturally inherant in its structure that will eventually kill it, such as Quantum Leakage. However they take quadrillions of years.

Flukey

I think we can safely say that we'll be long gone before it is.

Capt'n Midnight

depends on how you define the end

proton decay probably has a half life of 10^33 year give or take orders of magnitude so that probably limits the life of the physical universe

black hole evaporation would take longer , but I don't know if you would get enough matter produced to matter

bleg

11 billion years time

Karoma

You bastards! You doomed us all already! Stop now while there's still some hope.

ASTRONOMERS may have unwittingly hastened the end of the Universe by simply looking at it, according to a theory reported in the latest edition of New Scientist.

The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who attack the notion that the universe, believed to have been created in the "Big Bang'' some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever.

In fact, the poor old cosmos is in a rather delicate state, they say.

Until recently, a common idea was that the energy unleashed in the Big Bang happened when a "false vacuum'' - a bubble of high energy with repulsive gravity - broke down into a safe, zero-energy "ordinary'' vacuum.

But recent evidence has emerged that places a cosmic question-mark over this cosy thought.

For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the Universe is still expanding.

And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there.

Dark energy, goes the thinking, is a result of the Big Bang and is accelerating the universe's expansion.

If so, the universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vacuum'' state that may abruptly decay again - and with cataclysmic consequences.

The energy shift from the decay would destroy everything in the universe, "wiping the slate clean", says Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

The good news is: the longer the universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point, Mr Krauss believed.

The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock.

Mr Krauss and colleague James Dent pointed to measurements of light from supernovae in 1998 that provided the first evidence of dark energy.

These measurements might have reset the decay clock of the "false vacuum'' back to zero, back before the switching point and to a time when the risk of catastrophic decay was greater than now, said Mr Dent and Mr Krauss.

"Incredible as it seems, our detection of the dark energy may have reduced the life expectancy of the universe,'' said Mr Krauss.

"We may have snatched away the possibility of long-term survival for our universe and made it more likely it will decay.''

The report says the claim is contested by other astrophysicists and adds reassuringly: "The fact that we are still here means this can't have happened yet.''